April Fools’ Day, explained earnestly

It’s April Fools’ Day, so you’re probably devoting more brainpower than you’d care to admit to potential hoaxes that your friends and co-workers – heck, even your favorite news organizations – might pull on you. But why April 1, of all days?
 How did we come to associate the first day of the fourth month of the year with an opportunity to take advantage of the more gullible among us?
The short answer is nobody really knows.
 The longer answer: The first clear and widespread mentions of April Fools’ Day occurred in the 18th century. But even then, people wondered about its origins.
"Whence proceeds the custom of making April Fools?" one correspondent wrote in the British Apollo magazine in 1708. By that point, the custom was already well-established across parts of Europe, enough that people there regarded its origins as long-lost history.
No one is sure how, exactly, a tradition so potent could have sprung up without more frequent mentions in the written record in the centuries preceding. But it's clear that playing tricks and pulling pranks in the spring has a much richer history than you might expect for such a silly holiday.
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